Offered the studio a chance to take a step away from Gears of War

Jun 26, 2012 07:06 GMT  ·  By

Despite the name, the new Infinity Blade: Dungeons from developer Epic Games was not conceived as a spin-off but simply as a new take on a classic genre that needed a link to the franchise to attract gamers.

Rod Fergusson, who is the production director at Epic Games, has told Game Informer that, “It’s not an evolution of Infinity Blade; it’s not the next iteration of Infinity Blade. It’s a completely different game.”

He added, “What we did after we shipped Gears [of War] 3 is we did a game jam in the studio where we let a bunch of people self-organise into teams and come up with a week of just working in the engine, seeing what kind of fun things they could make.”

The idea of simply taking the dungeon crawler concept and then moving it to a mobile environment was initially linked to a team of just seven people who created a prototype and then the entire company reviewed their work and decided that it would put its full resources behind the project.

The first Infinity Blade title was created by Chair Entertainment, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Epic, but for Dungeons, Fergusson thought that it would be good for the entire team to work on the game in order to give them a break from simply churning out content for the Gears of War franchise.

Epic Games has seen the opportunities currently linked to gaming on mobile devices and plans to fully exploit them in the coming years, even as the company continues to work closely with Microsoft on its home console projects.

Gears of War: Judgment is set to launch during the fall exclusively on the Xbox 360 and will tell the story of Baird, delivering a prequel to the entire series.

Infinity Blade: Dungeons is expected on iOS-powered devices before the end of 2012.